In recent years, the means for providing information has undergone a change from old information providing methods utilizing television and radio broadcasting systems to novel information providing methods utilizing web pages on the Internet. In particular, based on the popularization of portable terminal devices such as a cellar phone, a user is able to access necessary information from an arbitrary location, and therefore, convenience has been greatly increased. Also, from a business side that provides commodities and services, store advertisements and guide information can be widely provided to users via web pages. When a user is in transit, the user is able to obtain a variety of information regarding stores, which the user plans to utilize, by browsing such web pages using a mobile terminal device.
Thus, when accessing information via the Internet, it is important to extract information matched with one's own requests from the great abundance of information. Therefore, the user carries out retrieval using a desired keyword, and accesses a web page on which necessary information is presented. For example, where the user goes out to have a meal or goes out shopping, the user is able to browse web pages of Italian food restaurants or women's clothing shops by using retrieval keywords such as [Italian food] and [women's clothing].
In addition, in order to efficiently provide appropriate information to individual users, various types of technologies are proposed. For example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2003-296358A discloses an information distribution system, in which information showing the tastes of individual users is collected in advance, for providing information that matches with the tastes of individuals, and Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2004-326211A discloses a manner in which the degrees of taste of respective users are stored as a profile based on situation information including an accompanying person. Further, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2002-108918A discloses a taste learning apparatus for learning the tastes of a specified user based on the behavior history of the user, and Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2007-193352A discloses a method for distributing advertisement information having further higher utilization value by using terminal position information obtained by the mobile terminal device.
As has been disclosed in the respective Patent Documents described above, several proposals have already been provided, which grasp the tastes of individual users and the present positions thereof and provide appropriate information to the individual users. However, since, in either technology described above, it is difficult to accurately predict which type of behavior individual users plan to perform at individual points in time, it is difficult to provide information on which the behavior pattern of a user is reflected.
Accordingly, the present invention has an object to provide an information providing system that is able to predict the behavior patterns of individual users as accurately as possible and to select and provide the information most suitable for the users.